Niche sociality: approaching adversity in everyday life

TY - JOUR

T1 - Niche sociality

T2 - approaching adversity in everyday life

AU - Manning, Nicholas

AU - Birk, Rasmus

AU - Rose, Nikolas

PY - 2022/7/4

Y1 - 2022/7/4

N2 - How should sociologists understand the everyday lives of those living in adversity, coping with the experience of structural violence? In this paper, focussing on the urban experience, we suggest a perspective on ‘everyday life’ that can encompass corporeal, mental, relational and social dimensions, which we term ‘niche sociality’. First, we use Gibson’s niches and affordances to enrich the post-representationalist understanding of human beings as embodied/ cultural/ environmentally embedded organisms. Second, we enrich Gibson’s niches and affordances with theories for ‘small-scale’ sociality drawn from social practice theory and interaction ritual chains. Third, we illustrate the productivity of these ideas throughout the paper, by grounding our conceptual work in empirical examples which analyse the everyday lives and mental life of migrant workers in Shanghai. Niche sociality, we argue, is a way of framing the experience of the everyday, a perspective which could – perhaps should – provoke novel ecosocial studies of adversity.

AB - How should sociologists understand the everyday lives of those living in adversity, coping with the experience of structural violence? In this paper, focussing on the urban experience, we suggest a perspective on ‘everyday life’ that can encompass corporeal, mental, relational and social dimensions, which we term ‘niche sociality’. First, we use Gibson’s niches and affordances to enrich the post-representationalist understanding of human beings as embodied/ cultural/ environmentally embedded organisms. Second, we enrich Gibson’s niches and affordances with theories for ‘small-scale’ sociality drawn from social practice theory and interaction ritual chains. Third, we illustrate the productivity of these ideas throughout the paper, by grounding our conceptual work in empirical examples which analyse the everyday lives and mental life of migrant workers in Shanghai. Niche sociality, we argue, is a way of framing the experience of the everyday, a perspective which could – perhaps should – provoke novel ecosocial studies of adversity.

KW - affordance, adversity, everyday, mental, migrants, niche, practices, Shanghai, sociality, urban

U2 - 10.1177/00380385221094770

DO - 10.1177/00380385221094770

M3 - Article

SN - 0038-0385

VL - 57

JO - Sociology

JF - Sociology

IS - 1

ER -